Coyote took their cat, sense of security

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“We are not getting another cat,” Valerie Jackson, seated at the head of her dining room table, adamantly tells her daughter, Lauren.

“We'll see …” Lauren responds softly but firmly.

I felt bad for them. It is why I made the drive to their Garden Grove home a few nights ago. Murderous coyote tales simply fascinate me. To me, it seems everyone has one.

There was the woman I wrote of a couple of years ago, who was so distraught over losing her dog to a coyote, that at night would don dark clothing, pack a meal – and I assumed, but never confirmed, a weapon – and would hunt the coyotes that roamed her neighborhood.

“I don't blame her a bit,” Valerie Jackson said when I recounted the story.

A coyote, a few months back, got Lauren's cat, Kitten. And what I found on my visit is that the young woman and her mother are on a bit of a crusade.

Lauren Jackson, 24, first of all, blames herself. Last June, she had decided to move to Wyoming to work on a dude ranch. Her mother and her father, Mike, agreed to watch over Kitten, a 6-year-old black cat Lauren got as a weeks-old kitten.

Yet all that the cat would do once Lauren had gone was look for her. She would plaintively meow outside the door to her bedroom. She would stalk the house in search of her. After about a week, all that Kitten wanted, which was strange, was to go outside. The cat had never before left the house.

Mike and Valerie also have a pair of could-be-anything mutt dogs, Crosby, 1, and Murphy, 6. They always left a door out back open for them to go outside. Kitten one day discovered it, and would use it to lie on a back patio sunning herself. By nightfall, she would always be back safely in the house.

And then, June 14 arrived.

Kitten never showed that night. The Jacksons searched the yard, the garage and every room in the house. The next afternoon when Valerie was at work, Mike sent her a text message: “Guess what I saw,” he wrote.

It was a coyote, perched on their far corner backyard wall. It had decided, they agreed that night, to return in case there was another Kitten scampering about.

About that time, Lauren had had quite enough of Wyoming, and she returned home. She cried.

And then she went to work.

She began walking the neighborhood collecting coyote sighting evidence. She had seen the one who'd gotten Kitten, a 50-pound monster, who was now joined on their back fence most evenings by a smaller one. Neighbors sympathized with her loss. They, too, had been victimized. Nearly a dozen pets, Lauren would soon document, would be lost to coyotes by late summer.

Her research would put the emergence of the coyotes in the neighborhood to the destruction of the nearby Seventh Street bridge off I-405 earlier that year.

It displaced scores of the animals, she says now. In Los Alamitos, she discovered, homeowners reported 33 pets missing shortly after the bridge came down.

The closing for renovation of Bell Middle School, which adjoins her parents' back yard, gave the animals a new sanctuary. Lauren Jackson walked her neighborhood even harder.

“I've been trying to educate people,” she said. People empathized with her loss. And one neighbor, Valerie Jackson said, told of finding Kitten in the Bell play yard.

“Her belly was missing,” he told me. And then she looked at her daughter. “Sorry, Lauren,” she said.

“I didn't want anyone else to go through what I had,” Lauren said, “I mean, Kitten was my baby. She slept with me every night.”

So she plastered the neighborhood with fliers that detailed coyote sightings, told of their nature and listed numbers for animal control and the city manager.

She doesn't expect the city or anyone else to do anything. She is hoping only that when Bell reopens later this year, the hundreds of schoolchildren will scare off the coyotes.

Ryan Drabek, director of Orange County Animal Care, says there is really nothing anyone can do. Residents can keep their pets and their food indoors and seal the lids of their garbage cans.

“I know that's tough for a lot of people,” he said. “It is simply the price we have to pay for being safe.”

Valerie and Lauren Jackson in recent weeks have spotted coyotes several times on the walls and the lawn of their back yard. Right now, they have pretty much abandoned going out there.

“It is the perfect storm,” Valerie Jackson said. “No one can do anything, and the coyotes are everywhere.”

Mother and daughter look at each other. That is when I asked them about maybe getting a new cat.

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